Podcast: The Progress Pride Flag, and the Realities of Intellectual Property

POSTED May 10, 2021

References

• Gilbert Baker - creator of the traditional pride flag

• Amber Hikes - creator of the 2017 Philadelphia Pride flag (the More Color, More Pride Flag). Connect with her on Instagram or Twitter

• Monica Helms - creator of the Trans Flag. Connect with her on Twitter or Facebook

• Sergeant Leonard Matlovich - added the black stripe to the pride flag in the “Victory Over AIDS” flag and suggested the stripe be removed when a cure for AIDS was found.

• Harvey Milk - political activist and politician

• Original colors & their meanings - Hot pink (sex), red (life), orange (healing), yellow (sunlight), green (nature), turquoise (magic and art), indigo (serenity), violet (spirit)

• The Hoist - the pole side of a flag

In this Episode

Forty years after Gilbert Baker created the original pride flag, why did we need an update?

It wasn't a conscious decision. Amber Hikes had made the Philadelphia Pride flag (the More Color, More Pride flag) in 2017, then in May of 2018, Seattle added the Trans Flag on top of the brown and black stripes of the More Color, More Pride flag as a way to be inclusive of trans people. And that was fantastic and the message was great, but we were running into design territory where the flag started to turn into a layer cake. Eleven stripes all stacked on top of each other can get convoluted really fast.

There wasn't really anything wrong with that flag. There are a lot of rules in Vexillology (the study of flags), including the rule "who cares about the rules," and I'm a firm believer in "who cares about the rules". But I wanted to see if I could do something to elevate the message and to add something to it. It was my way to take action in an area where taking action is more important than saying something. This was my way of using my talents to do something for the greater good. I saw what was being done, and wanted to see if I could do something more with it, to clarify the message.

And I ended up adding to the story because it became the "Progress Pride flag". I took what the other two designers had done and formulated this new image idea, and it added to the message itself, which was a sense of progress and the need for progress, which wasn't necessarily something that was inherent in the original design. It's implied in the message, but it wasn't inherent in the original design.

What is the history of the Pride Flag?

The original Gilbert Baker Pride Flag had eight stripes. It was pink, red, orange, yellow, green turquoise blue, and violet. There was a technicality that they couldn't mass produce the pink color in the 1970's. So they striped out the pink for that reason. Then Harvey Milk asked for the flag to be simplified even more, and that's what brought it down to the six-stripe flag that we now see as "the original". That six-strip flag is actually the third or fourth version. So I often call it the Traditional Pride flag.

Hot pink represented sex, red was life, orange was healing, yellow was sunlight, green was nature, turquoise was magic and art, Indigo was serenity and violet was spirit. Gilbert Baker had said that the colors and their designations represented the essence of people, and that's why people can say that it's all inclusive of everyone in the community, because each stripe doesn't represent a different part of the community, it represents an essence of who we are as a community.

How did you release the Progress Pride flag to the community? And how did it go viral?

I didn't make it for the purpose of going viral. I made it because I thought it was cool and I wanted to do something. I just made a public post of it on my Facebook and went to bed, and then woke up with it blowing up. As far as like the viral part of it, your guess is as good as mine on how that works. It just comes down to, "you don't really know who kicked the snowball over, but once it's rolling, that's where it is.

I did try to, like, keep up with the Facebook post, but it was moving so fast that at a certain point I had to step back a little bit and let the smoke settle. It was the first time that anything of mine had really done anything or gone anywhere super big like that.

What did it feel like to go viral?

Like I was going to die. That sounds terrible, but to give you a little bit of backstory, in the six months prior, I had started dealing with anxiety and agoraphobia. So for me that entire day was a panic attack. I remember calling one of my friends and being like, "I don't know what's going on, I don't know what to do about it." And he's just like, "calm down, take a breath, you're going viral. It will be fine."

I could have just turned off my phone and hid from it for a few weeks, but at the end of the day, I really couldn't just sit there without doing something.

What sort of pushback did you get when you created the Progress Pride flag? Did it feel fair?

I did get some pushback. First and foremost, anyone who has anything to say, their feelings are always valid. I'm not going to invalidate somebody's feelings. However, I'm not necessarily going to take everything that somebody says because I would run a battle in circles. It would never end. I'm also just not very good with confrontation and criticism to begin with. And I also want to preface, I never was doing this to be a savior. It's not my job to be a white savior. That's not my thing. I was using my talents and my capabilities and whatever influence that I thought I had at the time, to push things forward.

I got some very valid pushback from a few people in communities of color who felt that I was overstepping my boundaries as a white person. But I got mixed messages from the same community. A number of people were like "thank you for making this thing that represents us and really pushes the message". So I went with acknowledging, to the best I could, the people who had feedback that was negative, but at the same time take note of the fact that there's this overwhelming amount of people who appreciate it from those communities who are saying the flag has a lot of value.

I didn't do this with the intent of telling people what they could and couldn't do. If that flag works for you, then you fly that flag. Nobody's telling you you can't. But if this flag works for you, it's here for you. I have not forced anything on anyone. You decide to engage with it and take it on, and that's not my issue.

This is a piece of your intellectual property that has been embraced by the community. What is the tension between letting the community use it and then yet controlling its use?

I originally released it under a CC license, creative commons. I did a non-commercial, share with attribution, international license, kind of thing. There was a lot of depth in my reasoning as to why I did that that people didn't understand at first. And I got a lot of pushback from people who felt like this was an iconic symbol that belongs to the community and I shouldn't have control over it. While I get that, I firmly believe that artists deserve recognition and compensation for their work. I don't believe in the continued stigma that art is free and artists are poor and need to be poor to be legit artists. So you can use the flag, but non-commercially. If you want to talk commercial, we can talk about it.

A changing point for me was when I started to see it getting used in a way that I didn't personally agree with. Companies were snatching it up, making stuff out of it, and selling it without my attribution attached. It was purely rainbow capitalism based marketing.

What is rainbow capitalism?

Rainbow capitalism is when a company changes all their logos to rainbows for June and sells their product with a bunch of rainbows all over it to gay people. And then as soon as June's over, they go back to the normal thing and ignore us for 11 more months.

What did you do to intervene in the rainbow capitalism you saw happening?

I changed the terms. Changed how it worked legally. I made a tiered system that favors small artists and small businesses and has heftier requirements on larger businesses, or businesses that are purely in it for profit. If you're an artist or a very small maker or just a regular person who wants to post it on your social media or make a piece of art out of it, make it, it's totally fine. You're free to do that. If you want to tag me, great I'll like your post. I love seeing all the art that gets made, it's great. If you're a small business or an artist who wants to make something that you want to profit off of, come talk to me, I'll probably give you a free license. If a large, multi-million dollar company approached me and wanted to put out 15 products to make money off of the flag, I would want some kind of licensing deal. If you're going to make money off of something that I created within my community it's only fair that you give back not just to me as the artist, but the community itself, too. Plus I'm all for making large corporations pay for the things they want to do.

What is it like to so suddenly be a small business owner?

It has hardened my soul! Just kidding.

I am a small business owner with no background in business and it's really stressful. It takes away from being an art maker as much as I want to be, which is why I have a team now that takes care of some of the logistical things that I just can't mentally handle anymore. A friend of mine consults for small businesses that are especially small, like just starting. Because the problem that often happens is that a creative type makes something, it does really well, so they start a business around it. And then they get stuck in all of the business stuff and it burns them out and they lose the business. This consultant goes into small businesses and helps them figure out the day to day. That way the artist can go back to being the maker and the business can be the business. They're on my team and I've been really grateful. It's allowed me to get back into the making which is what I should be doing as a creative type. I shouldn't be expending my energy on business-oriented things.

How do you feel like you have impacted your community with the Progress Pride Flag?

I think the flag has caused a whirlwind of discussion across the world. There's a world level of discussion, a country level of discussion, cities, groups, friend-circles. All sorts of different levels of discussions are happening around this flag and what it means. The real critical thinking in those discussions is, for me, the bigger impact.

Is it difficult to keep the mission as the main thing, when there's so much business around?

No. I don't really like talking about sales. Just because I'm able to have some level of income for the first time in my life as an artist is not an important part of this design. The message and mission are always the first thing and always have been first. It's why it started. The businesses that utilize it are something that came afterward.

What was the creative process you went through in creating the Progress Pride Flag?

I'm the type of designer that will make the finished product first, iterate all over it, and then go back to the first one and realize that was the right one. So I often suffer from extreme insomnia and in that timeframe is usually when I'm most creative. That night, I was chatting with a friend who is also a creative and suffers from insomnia, and I was making versions of the flag and sending them to her for feedback

When it comes to the composition of the flag, I wanted to retain the traditional six-stripe flag in some way while still acknowledging the things that need to be acknowledged. So I separated the two elements away from each other. The traditional six stripes and the new five stripes, the black, the brown, the blue, the pink, and the white. Oftentimes an element that is part of a flag that isn't part of the main background of a flag is set against the hoist (the pole side of a flag).

I had done diagonal stripes and vertical stripes, but that was the same as the horizontal stripes, there were too many stripes. I felt that giving it a shape could change it from just being a group of extra stripes. So originally I made the chevron shape. Then I tried other shapes, even circles at one point, but I ended up sticking with the chevron shape because it aided the message that I learned while making it.

When it comes to creating something, the message or the implications of something that I design isn't always premeditated. I've not necessarily fully thought through something until I've made it and it's made itself apparent, which I think is totally valid. In the creative process, you can make something and be like, "Oh, wow, this makes it seem like this," or "this adds to this messaging"

When I had the chevron shape on it, I asked myself other than aesthetics, why this shape? Why this direction? Why this positioning? And that's when I saw the progress part of it. This is an arrow and arrows point somewhere and mean movement. And there was the message and the mission that we have, but it is still ongoing and it is still necessary. It is a progression that we need to keep doing. So the composition lent itself to shift the messaging a little bit.

What does the chevron represent?

The chevron is composed of three main pieces. There is the trans pride flag, which is the blue, pink, and white that was made by Monica Helms. It represents the trans community. The black and the Brown is from the More Color, More Pride Philadelphia Pride Flag. That was meant to highlight the need for a greater focus on people of color within our community, as they are often more marginalized than the white counterparts within the community.

I also added in a second meaning for the black stripe. Something that's very prevalent in our community is the stigmatization of people living with HIV and AIDS. And back in our history we had the "Victory Over AIDS" flag made by Technical Sergeant Leonard Philip Matlovic, which was the traditional six-stripe flag with a black Stripe added to the bottom. He wanted all flags to be made that way until we had a cure and then when a cure was found, all those black stripes would be cut off and burned ceremoniously. I really liked that sentiment so I imbued that same idea onto the black strike portion of the flag as a dual meaning that this is for those people who continue to be stigmatized for a disease that they don't need to be stigmatized for. We lost a whole generation of people to this disease. We don't need to continue to treat these people like they're dirty or gross or terrifying because they're living and they're healthier than a lot of people who don't have HIV.